Differential Responses to Constraints on Naming Agency Among Indigenous Peoples and Immigrants in Canada Karen E
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Western University Scholarship@Western Anthropology Publications Anthropology Department 2019 Differential Responses to Constraints on Naming Agency among Indigenous Peoples and Immigrants in Canada Karen E. Pennesi University of Western Ontario, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/anthropub Part of the Civic and Community Engagement Commons, Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons, Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Linguistic Anthropology Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Citation of this paper: Pennesi, Karen (2019) “Differential Responses to Constraints on Naming Agency among Indigenous Peoples and Immigrants in Canada.” Language and Communication 64: 91-103. Citation: Pennesi, Karen (2019) “Differential Responses to Constraints on Naming Agency among Indigenous Peoples and Immigrants in Canada.” Language and Communication 64: 91-103. Link to published article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2018.11.002 Author: Karen Pennesi Department of Anthropology Social Science Centre University of Western Ontario London, Ontario Canada N6A 5C2 [email protected] Author Biography Karen Pennesi is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Western Ontario. Her research explores how language plays an integral part in the construction of individual and group identities. She is currently investigating how personal names influence self- perception and how social inequalities are manifest in the treatment of different kinds of names. Abstract This article illuminates the social structures and relations that shape agency for members of two marginalized groups in Canada and examines how individuals respond differently to constraints on their power to name themselves and their children. Constraints on spelling, structure and choice of name are framed according to the particular positions of indigenous peoples and immigrants in relation to European settler society as either ‘original inhabitants’ or ‘recent arrivals’. These historically unequal power relations are manifest in intertwined ideologies of language, identity and nation, evident in ethnographic interviews, media reports and online commentary. Differential responses include resistance, endurance and assimilation. Keywords: agency; names; immigration; indigenous; Canada; media 1 1. Agency and Naming One way to see how agency is constructed and negotiated in language is to consider the degree of flexibility an individual has in doing what they want to do with names. Contexts where one set of naming constraints is applied to names originating from different naming traditions make conflicting ontologies of names visible and create rich opportunities for mapping out the sociopolitical positions from which people negotiate and enact naming agency. Following Ahearn (2001), I define agency as the capacity to act within the constraints of sociocultural mediating forces, where ‘acts’ are specified as those related to names. Naming agency takes various forms, such as the power or freedom to: choose an appropriate name for oneself or another person bestow or impose a name on someone, thereby inscribing an identity or relationship ensure the proper use, pronunciation and spelling of a name by others in a form of stewardship so that the name endures and is respected change or alter a person’s existing name to achieve a specific purpose or wish Through an examination of three cases, I illuminate how cultural forces and sociopolitical systems of power mediate the enactment of different forms of individual agency in specific contexts surrounding personal names. I compare how agents have more or less flexibility (Kockelman 2007) in using names as the means for achieving their desired ends, and how naming agents are subject to praise or blame for particular (sometimes imagined) outcomes. As Bucholtz observes, ‘It is particularly at the borders where ethnoracialized groups come into contact that names become sites of negotiation and struggle over cultural difference, linguistic autonomy, and the right to self-definition’ (2016:275). This negotiation is evident in current language ideologies, discourses and naming practices found in the ethnographic interviews, media reports and online commentary that comprise my data sets. I present an analysis of the complex contexts in which immigrants and indigenous people in Canada find their naming practices are constrained by governments, institutions, businesses, and public opinion as part of a broader push toward linguistic assimilation of these groups. I argue that the discursive construction of indigenous people as ‘original inhabitants’ and immigrants as ‘recent arrivals’ in relation to the dominant, European settler society leads to different understandings of agency and how it can effectively be enacted by members of each group. The three cases demonstrate how individuals negotiate this sociopolitical positioning and enact different forms of agency by resisting, enduring or adapting to naming constraints. 2. Data and Methodology The first two cases are ethnographic accounts of naming troubles based on my interviews with adult immigrants to London, Ontario, Canada. These interviews were recorded between 2012 and 2014 as part of a larger study on names and identity in Canada. Case 1 is about an Indonesian man who has only a single name component (i.e. a mononym), which has caused him difficulties in interactions with Canadians. Case 2 is about an Iranian man who changed his name when he immigrated to Canada and who gave his sons English names. Working from the transcribed interviews, I summarize each of the stories and include verbatim quotes from the transcripts where these are analytically significant. Supplementary information has been added from existing literature. Pseudonyms are used to protect confidentiality but correspond to the gender, ethnicity and language of the original names in keeping with the 2 analytical points I am making. Case 3 is about an indigenous woman in Canada who is pursuing a legal fight to have her daughter's name written in Chipewyan characters on her birth certificate. The data for this case comes mainly from a set of online news articles posted between 6-12 March 2015 by major Canadian news sources (CBC News, Maclean's magazine, The Toronto Star and Northern News Services Online), and a radio interview on CBC Radio's As It Happens in the same period. To get a sense of public discourses surrounding naming agency in Canada, the data set also includes 743 comments posted by readers of those stories and posts to the social media platform, Twitter, found with the search term ‘Chipewyan baby name’. Nearly all of the Twitter posts contained a link to the original CBC News story and many also included other comments. Comments that did not explicitly address the naming issue were excluded, such as simple statements of support (e.g. ‘You go girl!’) and those that merely criticized authors of previous comments (e.g. pointing out grammatical mistakes or ad hominem attacks not related to the story). While all comments were analyzed, only representative examples are presented here. Comments are reproduced verbatim including all errors, spacing and punctuation. Underlining has been added to indicate text emphasized in the analysis. Comments have been anonymized; they are identified with numbers and the news source where they appeared. All three cases provide interpretations of individual choices and circumstances. Since the two cases about immigrants’ names (1 and 2) make reference to assumptions made in interactions with Canadians and especially people in powerful roles, I have included the media stories and related online comments that comprise Case 3 to allow for an analysis of public discourses surrounding names, immigrants and indigenous peoples. I take the beliefs, values and understandings articulated in these public discourses to be representative of those which influenced the thoughts, feelings and actions of the immigrants described in the first two cases. In other words, newcomers to Canada are made aware of their own position in existing social hierarchies and of expectations about names through things they hear others say about them or others. Examining media representations and public commentary about names helps illuminate the ideologies that underlie the discourses and social structures they refer to in their own stories. I recognize the limitations of including online comments which are essentially anonymous, as commenters use pseudonyms for their user names. There is no information reliably provided about age, gender, region of origin or other potentially important variables, aside from what is mentioned by the writer in the post. My aim in including these comments is to describe some common discourses circulating among Canadians as a way to better understand the context in which naming agency is negotiated. In the following sections I describe each of the three cases, paying attention to ontologies of names and constructions of agency in different political and cultural contexts. I then demonstrate how the agency of immigrants and indigenous people, and the constraints they face, are framed in different ways in public discourses and in media representations of these groups. I conclude with a summary of how agency, identity and naming are intertwined in discourse. 3. Case 1: A Man with One Name Najmuddin is an Indonesian man from Java with a